September 2000 - Certain measures add greatly to the fiscal cost of banking crises: unlimited deposit guarantees, open-ended liquidity support, repeated recapitalization, debtor bail-outs, and regulatory forbearance. The findings in this paper tilt the balance in favor of a strict rather than an...

"An apparent temporary narrowing of income inequality has been observed during several recent banking crises. But it would be a mistake to conclude that such crises don't matter for the poor. For one thing, the correlation is not strong, and the opposite pattern has also been present. Besides,...

"Given the acknowledged need for a new effort to expand the set of available data on direct access to financial services, including a focus on access by those at low income, Honohan provides a selective review of the diverse sources of data that exist and considers how best to build on them. He...